Dear A. M.! As for your coming — that's unnecessary on your part. Well, why should I quarrel with Maximov, Lunacharsky, and so on? You yourselves write: you bristle among yourselves — and you call for bristling before the people. Not a model. And as for repelling workers, that too is unnecessary. Now, if they accept our invitation and come to us, we'll have a good talk with them, we'll fight it out over the views of one newspaper*, which certain factionalists abuse (I've been hearing this from Lyadov and others for a long time) — calling it the dullest, poorly educated, needed by no one, not believing in the proletariat and socialism.

As for the new schism, your reasoning doesn't add up. On the one hand, both are nihilists (and "Slavic anarchists" — oh, my friend, haven't non-Slavic Europeans in times like ours fought, abused each other, and split a hundred times more thoroughly!) — and on the other hand, the schism will be no less deep than that between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. If the matter is the "nihilism" of these "spiky ones," the poor education and so forth of some who don't believe in what they write, and so on — then, that means, the schism is not deep, and is not even a schism at all. But if the schism runs deeper than between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks — then the matter is not nihilism and not disbelieving writers. It doesn't add up, truly! You are mistaken about the present schism, and you justly say: "I understand the people, but I don't understand their deeds."

What seems to you and Maximov to be insincerity and worthlessness and so forth in the *Proletarian*, is explained by an entirely different point of view on the entire present moment (and on Marxism, of course). We have been marking time for some two years now, chewing over those questions which still seem "disputable" to Maximov, which life has long since

* The reference is to the organ of the Bolshevik Center — the newspaper *Proletarian*. [Editor's note]

** Addition regarding "justly": I must qualify this. Not understanding deeds, one cannot understand people either, except... externally. That is, one can understand the psychology of one or another participant in the struggle, but not the meaning of the struggle itself, not its party and political significance.

resolved. And if we were to continue "disputing" about them, we would still be marking time uselessly now. But by parting ways, we will show the workers clearly, directly, and definitively two paths forward. The worker social-democrats will make their choice easily and quickly, because the tactic of preserving (in cans) the revolutionary words of 1905-06 instead of applying the revolutionary method to the new, different situation, to a changed epoch, requiring different methods and different forms of organization — this tactic is dead. The proletariat is going toward revolution and will come to it — but not as before 1905: those who "believe" it is going and will come, but do not understand this "not as before" — to them our position must seem insincere, worthless, dull, based on disbelief in the proletariat and socialism, and so forth and so on. The divergence flowing from this is, without question, deep enough to make the schism — at least the foreign one — inevitable. But even remotely it does not approach the depth of the schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, if we speak of the depth of schism within the party, of social-democracy, of Marxists.

You are surprised how I do not see the hysteria, lack of discipline (you should not speak of this, nor should Mikhail listen to it) and other vices of Mikhail. Well, I had the chance to test him on a small matter: I thought that a conversation between us and you would not come about, that there was nothing to write about. Under the impression of a conversation with Mikhail, I wrote immediately, in the heat of the moment, without even rereading the letter, without putting it off until tomorrow. The next day I think: I blundered, I believed Mikhail. But it turned out that, however much Mikhail gets carried away, he was right to the extent that a conversation between us and you did take place — not without some thorns, of course, not without the annihilation of the *Proletarian*, well, but what can one do about it!

I shake your hand firmly. N. Lenin

1909
on the island of Capri (Italy)

Written in November, no earlier than the 20th

Sent from Paris

First published October 15,
1924 in *Red Newspaper* no. 236

Printed from the manuscript